Conceptualizing Racism

Noel A. Cazenave is professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, where he also teaches in the Urban and Community Studies program. In addition to many journal articles, book chapters, and other publications, he coauthored Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card against America’s Poor, which won five book awards, and has more recently published Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on PovertyCommunity Action Programs and The Urban Racial State: Managing Race Relations in American Cities.

Cazenave offers a critical reading of the language of racism in sociological thought and US society, providing a searing assessment of how scholars, politicians, journalists, and everyday people understand racism and use language to deny, distance, and evade it. Specifically, he argues that dominant formulations of the concept obscure, evade, and erase the systematic and structural aspects of racial oppression, and instead equivocate and accommodate through appeals to individual beliefs, psychological biases, and universal capacities. Moreover, he asserts, such formulations reinforce racial hierarchies and racist exclusions, making it more difficult to study, understand, and change them. In doing so, Cazenave offers a strongly worded indictment of sociology while advancing discussions of racism today. Key to this is his sensitive reading of the history of theory and method in sociological thought, sharp assessment of shifting racial structures, and a keen eye for deciphering the entanglements of race, power, and language. This is an important text for scholars who study these subjects. Of equal importance is its usefulness in the training of future academics, social analysts, and policy makers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

• Prologue: Sociology as Autobiography Introduction: Racial Accommodation and the Misconceptualization of RacismUnderstanding Linguistic Racial Accommodation and ConfrontationLinguistic Racial Accommodation from Slavery to the Civil Rights Movement Linguistic Racial Accommodation and Confrontation from the Civil Rights Movement to The Declining Significance of RaceTheoretical Fragmentation: The White Backlash and Its Legacy of Failure Defining Racism: Beyond Mini-Racism and the “Race” as Agency ConceptConfronting Racially Accommodative Language by Conceptualizing Racism as a System of Oppression Conclusion: Lessons Learned and Challenges Remaining: Toward a More Honest Conceptualization of Racism Epilogue: Unfinished Business in Confronting Racially Accommodative Language